So early as 1739 he expressed his dislike of formal gardens in his sarcastic description of the grounds at Versailles. The same feeling of irritation at the preponderance of art over Nature recurs in his description of Warwick in 1754. That even the most natural garden did not satisfy Gray as did wild Nature we see from Mason’s lines written just after the death of Gray. He evidently had not approved of “The Garden” as a subject for a poem and Mason represents him as saying:

In general, however, the testimony of the letters is to a scientific rather than a poetic love of Nature. There are many exact records of the weather, of the coming crops, of the blossoming of flowers. A single example may serve as typical. It is a record of observations made at Stoke Pogis in July, 1754.

And so on with nearly a hundred more of the tabulated natural facts.

Of Gray as a traveler Sir James Mackintosh is quoted by Mitford as saying: “Gray was the first discoverer of the natural beauties in England, and has marked out the course of every picturesque journey that can be made in it.”

The dogmatic absoluteness of such a statement is its own ruin. We have already seen that Gray had at least three predecessors, Dalton, Amory, and Brown, in his recognition of the beauty of the Lake Region, and many a new tour was sought out by later lovers of the picturesque. But Gray’s “Journal in the Lakes,” though not first, is certainly most important. Both in feeling and in spontaneity and adequacy of expression it shows a marked advance on his preceding work, and as literature it is distinctly in advance of what others had done.

The whole of this famous tour occupied but three weeks, and the trip in the Lakes but ten days. Gray was by no means so unwearied in sight-seeing as Young. He was “not fond of dirt,” and he was fastidious about roads and inns. He did not go on an eager search for views. He did not climb Skiddaw, and he passed by Orrest-Head. He saw what he could see comfortably. His descriptions are quiet and controlled. They have none of the “dizzy raptures” of Brown and Young. There is no straining after epithets, no struggle to find expression adequate to the emotion. The following brief quotations may serve to indicate his style:

The charm of Gray’s descriptions lies in a certain bare perfection of phrase, in his direct, unadorned statement of beautiful facts. His words have a vital, penetrating quality, while his sense of form, his artistic reticence, keep his enthusiasm free from exclamatory extravagances.

Thomas Pennant’s first tour in Scotland was made in 1769. The notes taken on this tour were put into shape and published in 1771. Dissatisfied with the result, he went again in 1772, and his “Second Tour in Scotland and the Hebrides” appeared in 1776. In the first tour his professed object was the study of zoölogy. In the second he was assisted by two friends, one trained in botany, and the other well up in Scotch customs and legends. But Pennant’s interest was not confined to zoölogy and botany, to manners and customs. His curiosity was omnivorous and insatiable. Everything was fish that came to his net, and his industry in note-taking was prodigious. The two journeys occupied six months, and the record of what he saw and heard filled 570 folio pages.

In this mass of observations not more than ten pages, all told, have anything to do with the scenery through which he passed. Such descriptive passages as do occur are usually of torrents, rapid, rocky rivers, or the shores of lakes. The best of these are of the banks of the Nith, the falls of CoryLin in the Clyde, the Cascades at Moness, which he calls “an epitome of everything that can be admired in the curiosity of waterfalls,” the falls and streams near Loch Maree, Aysgarth Force in the Ure, the little lake of Barrisdale on the Inverness coast, Coniston, and Derwentwater. He prides himself on being one of the first to describe Coniston.

He very often notes wide views, and he has an unfailing interest of a scientific, botanical sort in the forests through which they pass.

He never, however, notes any but the permanent details of a scene. There is not a hint that he saw the varying, evanescent, atmospheric effects, so important an element in the beauty and sublimity of mountain scenery. He does admit that the “Highlands like other beauties, have their good and bad days,” but there is nothing in his books to show that he knew them apart.

On the whole he shows a preference for a region of smooth, rich, arable land. On leaving the Highlands his comment is,

He dislikes the Borrowdale end of Derwentwater where “all the possible variety of Alpine scenery is exhibited, with all the horror of precipice, broken crag, or overhanging rock, or insulated pyramidal hills.” He prefers the outlook toward Skiddaw.

So far as Nature is concerned, the passages cited show Pennant at his best. His descriptions are full, clear, painstaking, but unimaginative. He is as impersonal and impartial, as conscientiously exact, in taking notes on a landscape as in recording the annual haul of fish in Scotch lakes. Beautiful scenes were to him an object of intellectual curiosity. They made no artistic or emotional appeal. “The visions of the hills and the souls of lonely places” were a strain upon him. He was glad to come forth into fertile valleys and pleasant corn lands.

All this is true, and Pennant shows much less of the new spirit than Brown, Amory, Young, and Gray. But his work was done independently of theirs, and in 1769. He must have been in the Lake District a month before Gray, and he penetrated into much wilder regions of Scotland than had before been described. That his instinctive shrinking from wild scenes should have been so far overcome as it was, that he should have been often forced into admiration, is of itself proof of the strength of the new impulse.

The Rev. William Gilpin made many tours and gave full accounts of them, but the accounts were not published till years after the tours were made. His chief travels in their order are:

(1) Tour in Norfolk, Cambridge, Suffolk, and Essex (1769; account published 1809); (2) tour along the river Wye (1770; published 1782); (3) tour in Cumberland and Westmoreland (1772; published 1786); (4) tour in North Wales (1773; published 1809); (5) tour in Hampshire, Sussex, and Kent (1774; published 1804); (6) tour in the Highlands of Scotland (1776; published 1789); (7) tour in Western England (before 1778; published 1798).

Mr. Gilpin’s point of view is clearly stated in the Preface to the first of these publications. “The following little work proposes a new object of pursuit: that of examining the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty.” He hopes that no one will consider his plan unduly light and trivial for a clergyman. He is himself convinced that to study the beauty of a country is as noble, in a way as useful, as to study its agriculture.

By picturesque beauty Gilpin always means beauty that can be put into a picture. He draws pictures of mountains to show whether they have or have not a good sky-line. Some are too regular, some are grotesque, some look deformed. He seldom dwells long on wide views because they are so difficult to make interesting in a picture. The grandeur of Penmaenmawr and Snowdon hardly makes up to him for their lack of picturesqueness. Penmaenmawr “has no variety of line, but is one heavy lumpish form.” He starts up Snowdon, but finding that it is merely “a collection of mountains formed on the old gigantic plan of heaping mountain on mountain,” he does not go to the top, but contents himself with quoting Pennant’s description of the view.

Gilpin’s language is often borrowed from the art of painting. He calls the steep banks of rivers “side screens;” the changing view before him as he floats down the river is a “front screen.” He is always talking about foregrounds and backgrounds and perspective and composition. He says that Nature is great in design, an admirable colorist, and that she harmonizes tints with infinite variety and beauty. But, he adds,

With his sense of form Gilpin has also an unusual sensitiveness to color, and to varieties of light and shade. The following description of a sunset is typical:

“No one can paint a country properly,” he says, “unless he has seen it in various lights.” The local variations caused by the weather, the time of day, the time of year, “cannot be too much attended to by all lovers of landscape.” “Every landscape is seen best under some peculiar illumination.” He has always the painter’s eye for fogs, mist, haze, soft coloring, atmosphere.

Gilpin studied Nature according to the rules of art, because, as he said, these rules were drawn from Nature. No man resented more quickly than he the transforming hand of man in natural scenes. If lands must be turned to agricultural uses, if fields must be marked off, he only wishes that it might be made as little apparent as possible. He hates “a multiplicity of glaring temples” in a landscape. He thinks most so-called adornments in private grounds are mere “expensive deformity,” and he calls regular clipped hedges “objects of deformity.” He apologizes for his severe strictures on several estates in the Cumberland region by saying that the grand natural scenes so filled his thought that he could not restrain his contempt for mere embellished, artificial ones. Such passages are an emphatic indication of the revolution in taste since the days of the formal garden. Here is a characteristic sentence written as they leave the Lakes: “Here the hills grow smooth and lumpish, and the country at every step loses some of the wild strokes of Nature and degenerates, if I may so speak, into cultivation.”

Not infrequently Gilpin turns from the painter’s study of the scene, and gives something of its poetical quality. In speaking of the appeal made by the Lake Country to the imagination he says, “No tame country, however beautiful, however adorned, can distend the mind like this awful and majestic scenery.” Of “Ulzwater” on a perfectly serene day he says, “So solemn and splendid a scene raises in the mind a sort of enthusiastic calm which spreads a mild complacence over the breast, a tranquil pause of mental operations which may be felt but not described.” And again in his “Essay on Picturesque Travel,”

These last passages inevitably recall Wordsworth’s analysis of his own emotions before a beautiful view when

or the better-known lines in “Tintern Abbey.”

Gilpin, if we take the whole extent of his work, represents the new spirit more fully than any of the other early travelers. He notes the permanent and the evanescent. He observes color, form, and motion. The technical quality of his descriptions does not seriously interfere with the impression they give of pleasure in free, wild Nature, and he again and again shows himself capable of an imaginative communion with Nature.

In 1770 appeared “Letters from Snowdon” by Joseph Cradock. This book is the first record I have found of travels in Wales for the special purpose of enjoying the scenery. Mr. Cradock says that he had long wished to visit “The Welsh Alps, the summit of Snowdon” and he seems to find the reality even more attractive than his imagination had pictured it. The beautiful little valleys “environed by mountains that scale the heavens,” and “the infinitely extensive and variegated prospect” from the top of Snowdon enchant him. The travelers are caught in tempestuous weather but Mr. Cradock rejoices in the war of the elements and quotes Thomson’s description of a thunderstorm in Carnarvon. He particularly recommends the valley of the Dryryd to painters delighting in romantic Nature because of its picturesque wooded hills, its naked mountains, rocky rivers, foaming cataracts, transparent lakes, and ruined castles. Gilpin’s journey up Snowdon was made in the same year but even his account hardly shows the unforced, uncritical enthusiasm for wild Nature evinced by Mr. Cradock.

In 1773, Mr. Hutchinson and his brother, an accomplished draughtsman, made a tour through the Lakes. In 1774, after the death of his brother, Mr. Hutchinson went over the ground again in order to verify his brother’s incomplete sketches. The observations made in these two tours were published under the title “An Excursion to the Lakes in Westmoreland and Cumberland.” Hutchinson’s dislike of the wild and desolate region of Stainmore has already been cited, but that quotation alone would give a most unfair impression of the book as a whole. His pleasure in Nature is great. He cares especially for artistic effects of light and shade, and he often spends pages on the changing beauty of a landscape seen at sunset, or sunrise, or after a storm. A single passage may stand as illustrative of many similar ones in the book.

Mr. Hutchinson had evidently read many of the books treating especially of the beauty of Nature. He quotes the whole of Dr. Brown’s “Letter” and much of Mr. Dalton’s “Poem.” He also quotes freely from Thomson’s “Seasons,” Mason’s “Garden,” and Pennant’s account of Derwentwater. Some of his most effective descriptions are of the road from Keswick to Ambleside, “the finest ride in the north of England;” of the cataract near Ambleside, probably Stock Gill Force; of the ascent of Skiddaw and of a thunderstorm seen from its summit; of Derwentwater from various points of view, and of a moonlight row upon the lake. They are too long to quote, but they all show faithful and minute observation, artistic appreciation of beauties of form and color, and, occasionally, a lively sense of the deeper significance of the places visited.

Five or six years after Mr. Hutchinson’s “Tour” there appeared an important “Guide to the Lakes,” by Mr. West. The second edition, revised and annotated by Mr. Cockin came out in 1779, and the ninth edition in 1807. A special feature of West’s “Guide” was its “Addenda” under which heading he published all the best-known descriptions of the Lakes. The chief of these were Dr. Brown’s “Letter,” portions of Dr. Dalton’s “Poem,” the whole of Gray’s “Journal,” Mr. Cumberland’s “Ode to the Sun,” selections from Relph’s “Cumberland Pastorals,” and two descriptions of tours in search of noted caves. In 1807 were added Mrs. Radcliffe’s “Ride over Skiddaw” (1794) and the Rev. James Plumptre’s “Night Piece on the Banks of Windermere.” The “Guide” itself shows much careful investigation, is written in a clear, intelligible fashion, and betrays genuine and discriminating love of Nature.

The most important English tours were made between 1768 and 1778. Pennant, Gray, Young, Gilpin, and Hutchinson made during these ten years sixteen rather extended journeys, of which they gave full accounts. Besides these we have Dr. Johnson’s “A Journey to the Hebrides” (1773; published 1775), Boswell’s “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides” (1773; published 1786), and Bray’s “Tour into Derbyshire” (1777). In Boswell’s “Journey” there is not the slightest indication of any interest in the scenery through which they passed, and the general impression given by Boswell is that Johnson’s indifference was equal to his own. For instance, Boswell wonders at the outset if a man who has known “the felicity of London life” can fail to find any narrower existence “insipid or irksome.” He quotes Dr. Johnson as saying at Portree that he “longed to be again in civilized life.” He records his famous sayings, “By seeing London I have seen as much of life as the world can show,” and “Who can like the Highlands?” This is not quite fair to Johnson, because in his own account of the Scotch tour and in his letters there are a few passages that indicate close observation, and even enjoyment, of the wild scenes about him. The finest passage is a description of a storm:

But Johnson’s attitude toward the external world was, on the whole, the typical classical one, and is well illustrated by his reply to Mr. Thrale’s attempt to win his admiration of a fine prospect. “Never heed such nonsense; a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another. Let us, if we do talk, talk about something; men and women are my subjects of inquiry.”

Mr. Bray’s “Tour” has a full map and is written somewhat in the guide-book style. Industries, architecture, history, family chronicles, anecdotes, inscriptions, fill up its 135 closely printed folio pages. There is comparatively little about the scenes through which he passed. In describing the various estates which he visited pages are given to house-furnishings for a single paragraph on the grounds. But these seldom go unnoticed. He dislikes the formal garden. He objects to the regular cascades at Matlock. He thinks that the conceits in the water-works at Chatsworth might have been deemed wonderful when they were made, “but those who have contemplated the waterfalls which nature exhibits in this country ... will receive little pleasure from seeing a temporary stream falling down a flight of steps, spouted out of the mouths of dolphins or dragons, or squirted from the leaves of a copper tree.” The most extended description is of the gardens at Stowe, which he praises because, though laid out in the formal style, their regularity has been broken up and disguised. Mr. Bray also shows a liking for wild and romantic scenery. He frequently mentions wide views, and condemns Compton Wyngate because it has no prospect, of which, he adds, “our ancestors appear to have scarce ever thought.” The spots he enjoyed most are Matlock High Tor, and wild places on the Dove and the Derwent, Aysgarth Force in the Ure, and rocky Gordale. He noted especially waterfalls and rivers. Of the Derwent at Matlock he says:

Passages such as this, though perhaps not very effective, show an attention arrested by the beauties of Nature. There is a closeness of detail indicating first-hand observation, and the prevailing tone shows that Mr. Bray justly claims for himself “a taste for nature in her genuine simplicity.”

Of the “Travels” after 1778, numerous as they are, few need special mention, because almost no really new elements appear in them. A few new tours are sketched out, as to the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Man. But in general the same old ground is gone over, the preference still being accorded to Scotland, Wales, and the English Lakes. In 1796, but three years before Wordsworth went to Dove Cottage, there appeared four new “Tours” to the Lakes by Rudworth, Walker, Houseman, and Hutchinson. In 1794–95 there were five “Tours” in Wales. Of a few of these “Tours” after 1778 perhaps some mention should be made.

The Rev. Mr. Shaw’s “Tour” (1788) in the west of England is significant for two reasons. It is one of the first books to make literary associations prominent in the description. He says that Woodstock is classic ground because Chaucer lived there; Horton is sacred because of Milton; Beaconsfield, because of Waller; Windsor Forest, because of Pope; and Stoke Pogis, because of “the sublime and the pathetic Gray.” The second point of significance is Mr. Shaw’s evident irritation at the apparently overweening attention to mountains. He says that if people could forget Skiddaw and Ben Lomond for a little while they might be able to see the rich beauty of the champaign country about Malvern Hills. Mr. Shaw goes back to the “crowds and bustle” of London with great regret because, he says, no matter what society you find there, nothing can make up for the pensive enjoyments of a feeling mind in a picturesque country.

Hassel’s “Tour of the Isle of Wight” (1790) is in the style of Gilpin’s work. The general knowledge of the Lake Country and the general admiration of it is shown by his comparisons. A certain spot has “all the appearance of a Westmoreland scene.” Certain noble hills “rise with all the majesty of the Skiddaw mountains.” Hassel’s purpose is a search for the picturesque. He especially notes rich effects of color, and the varying lights of sunrise and sunset. He sees Nature in a succession of pictures, but his language is free from the technicalities of Gilpin.

Robertson’s “Tour in the Isle of Man” (1794) has little effective description, but it is noteworthy as one of the first books of travel to be infected by the sentimental melancholy of the romances. His Manxmen “recline by some romantic stream” in the true pensive spirit. He visits churchyards and solitary places. He pores over the mazy stream, he watches the rooks, he listens to the sighing evening breeze, very much like one of Mrs. Brooke’s lovelorn heroes. Occasionally he has some expressions of deeper import, as when he says that Nature not only charms the eye “but purifies and ennobles the soul.” “The mind is filled with divine enthusiasm.” He is, however, perhaps adequately characterized by the word “romantic,” which he uses until it becomes almost unbearable.

Of “Travels” in general we may say that the transfer of emphasis from man to Nature is strongly marked. The love of Nature as shown in “Travels” is later in development than it is in poetry, but when the new feeling does find expression it sounds no uncertain note, and by the end of the century has reached a statement as bold and unqualified as that which is found in the poetry itself.

CHAPTER V
GARDENING

When Charles II returned to England in 1660 he brought with him a knowledge of the new style of gardening in France, and an ambition to reform English taste according to French models. He committed the care of the royal gardens of Whitehall, St. James, and Hampton Court to French gardeners, and he spent money lavishly in various attempts to naturalize French flowers, fruits, and vines in English soil. With memories of the glories of Versailles he summoned Le Nôtre, the famous designer of French palatial gardens, and Grillet, noted for his skill in hydraulics, to plan the parks of St. James and Greenwich.[534] It is not certain that Le Nôtre actually came to England, but the royal parks and some great estates were laid out according to the dominant ideas of the French designer if not under his direct supervision. The French traditions thus established were carried on by John Rose who was sent to study the gardens at Versailles and who was appointed royal gardener in England. Rose’s pupil and successor, George London, in about 1690 took Henry Wise as partner and the two were for nearly a quarter of a century the recognized authorities on gardens in England. On the accession of Queen Anne, Wise became royal gardener, and London then confined himself to country work. He is said to have supervised most of the notable English estates, riding sometimes fifty or sixty miles a day in the course of his business.

London and Wise not only designed and developed gardens but they were influential writers on garden topics. Among their best works were “The Compleat Gard’ner,” 1699, and “The Retir’d Gardener,” 1706. These books, though they contained much new and original material, were in the main translations from French authors and contributed to the predominance of French influence. Evelyn’s writings also did much to establish French canons of taste in England. He had seen and greatly admired the work of Le Nôtre in the gardens of the Tuileries, Fountainebleau, and St. Germain, and in his “Dairy” he recorded fully the impression made upon him by the grandeur, beauty, and especially by the artificial marvels of these parks.

The French style was not, however, allowed all the honors. It met with a powerful rival in the Dutch taste that came in with William and Mary in 1688. This taste gradually prevailed over the French so that even London and Wise were affected by the new ideas from Holland and Flanders. Gardens laid out in the same decade were, the one French, the other Dutch in tone, or French and Dutch characteristics were mingled in the same garden. Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire, the gardens of which were remodeled and enlarged by Henry Wise between 1704–11 is cited by Blomfield and Thomas in “The Formal Garden in England” as “a very valuable instance of a garden laid out when the French influence was still dominant,” while the gardens at Levens in Westmoreland, laid out soon after 1690, and remaining almost unaltered to the present day, are referred to by Miss Amherst as “a most perfect example of the Dutch type of garden of this period.”[535] But whether Dutch or French in type, all the great gardens from 1660 to nearly the middle of the eighteenth century come under the general designation of formal gardens.

The most striking features of the Dutch style were topiary work, potted plants and shrubs, dwarf trees, and water-works of “quaint forms and surprise arrangements.” The gardens of Le Nôtre were especially marked by long, broad, straight avenues radiating from a goose-foot; much use of architecture in the way of temples, long and massive flights of steps, balustrades, columns, and urns; much statuary; fountains with many high and complicated jets, with magnificent marble basins, and with elaborate carving in representations of men and animals; many hedges both high and low; long and broad terraces; and parterres laid out in intricate plant embroidery.[536]

Our most accurate idea of the plans of these formal gardens comes from such books as “Les dèlices de la Grande Bretagne et de l’Irlande,” published in Leyden in 1707; “Britannia Illustrata” by Knyff and Kip, 1709; “Views of Kent” by Badeslade, 1722; and other early county histories.[537] One of Kip’s plans of Longleat is here reproduced. The grounds at Longleat were laid out between 1682 and 1690 under the supervision of London.[538] Though of exceptional magnificence, their characteristic features as shown in the plan are fairly typical of other great gardens of the period. Bird’s-eye views such as Kip gives are necessarily unfair representations since they crowd into startling juxtaposition features that are in reality widely separated, and since they do not even suggest charms of color, light and shade, fragrance, movement, the change of the seasons. But such plans are, nevertheless, of especial value in revealing the governing ideas of the garden designers.

One of these ideas is admirably brought out by Sir William Temple in his essay, “On the Gardens of Epicurus: or of Gardening in the Year 1685,” the most important article on gardening published in England in the seventeenth century. It is mostly given up to exposures, soils, scions, grafts, seeds, and the like, but here and there are significant statements of theory. “Among us,” he says, “the beauty of building and planting is placed chiefly in certain proportions, symmetries, and uniformities, our walks and our trees ranged so as to answer one another and at exact distances.” This defense of order in beauty is illustrated by his description of Moor Park, Hertfordshire, according to his taste the sweetest garden ever known. It was divided into quarters by gravel walks, and adorned with two fountains and eight statues in each quarter. The straight terrace walk had a summer-house at each end. On each side of the parterre was a cloister, over each cloister an airy walk, at the end of each airy walk a summer-house, and so on.[539] “Certain proportions, symmetries, and uniformities” is a phrase characteristic of classicism in thought and literary style as well as in gardens and it shows how completely the ideal garden represented the dominant thought of the age. Equally characteristic and interesting is Temple’s reason for approving of this style of gardening. In exact figures, with regular and definite intervals, it is, he says, “hard to make any great or remarkable faults.” In this sentence there is surely a suggestion of one reason for the love of order, of limits clearly set, that marked the classical spirit. Symmetries and proportions and uniformities were a specific against great and remarkable faults such as had resulted from the undue license of a romantic age. The beaten path had legitimate attractions for an age that had lost its way among the pleasures of the pathless woods.

A second principle underlying the formal garden was the delight men took in controlling Nature and in seeing evidences of such control. Radiating straight avenues as against vagrant paths; water flowing out of marble temples, down marble steps, and rising again in almost unbelievable shapes, as against a natural winding stream; a tree cut into difficult shapes as against a tree following the normal spread of branch and leaf—all of these show an exceptional satisfaction in the marks of human interference with Nature. Order in a garden, and skilful management of Nature by art, are of course legitimate sources of delight, but when these two principles are pushed to the exclusion of other sources of delight, reaction becomes inevitable.

Indications of revolt against the formal garden began early in the eighteenth century. Even so early as 1703 in James’s translation of Le Blond’s[540] treatise on the theory and practice of gardening there was a plea for simplification in the architectural details of a garden, accompanied by a protest against fantastic verdant sculpture. Plain hedges cut square with a regular succession of balls on top, and with niches sunk for statues or seats, was all the elaboration Le Blond could sanction. No new principles were inculcated by Le Blond. His defense of “a plain regularity” was really a protest against the cluttered and confused effect of gardens of the Dutch type. His dictum that “Art should give place to Nature, Art being used only to set off the beauties of Nature” sounds more revolutionary than it was apparently meant to be, for the gardens he describes are purely of the formal type, but his work shows a recognition of some of the whimsical extravagances in the formal gardens of his day, and an effort to apply the recognized rules with good sense and a certain degree of restraint.

The English essayists, notably Addison and Pope, were early exponents of a freer style of gardening. In “The Tatler” (August 31, 1710) Addison laughed the tulip mania out of court, and lightly set aside “the best ordered parterres” as of less charm than “a spot of daisies or banks of violets.” Slight as it is, this preference for the wild flower over the garden rarity, for fields and hedgerows over the choicest plant embroidery, strikes a new note in the garden literature of the eighteenth century. Two years later, in “The Spectator” for September 6, 1712, Addison gave an account of an imaginary garden evidently made to his taste and far enough removed from the formal garden. The irregularity and wildness of his flower-garden, the wandering rill that runs “as it would do in an open Field,”[541] the trees and shrubs growing freely, are what he prides himself upon. The whole picture is a plea for the “beautiful Wildness of Nature” as against “the nicer Elegancies of Art.” But Addison’s strongest utterance, and the one in which the theoretical side is most fully discussed is in “The Spectator” for June 25, 1712. In contrasting the works of Nature and Art, Nature is throughout given the preference.

Pope followed up this attack in a wittier fashion in “The Guardian” (September 29, 1713). He, too, prefers “the amiable simplicity of unadorned nature” to “the nicer scenes of art.” Only people of the common level of understanding are, he thinks, “principally delighted with the little niceties and fantastical operations of art,” while “persons of genius .... are always most fond of nature.” His chief attack is on sculptured greens, and he gives a sarcastic account of a town gardener who was so skilful that he could cut “family pieces of men, women, or children,” and who had for sale the most elaborate greens. His catalogue was as follows:

That the true principles of “gardening finely” were matters of common discussion is indicated by a letter from Pope to Lord Bathurst, September 23, 1719, on the subject of the gardens the prince of Wales was about to construct at Richmond. One critic, said Pope, protested against too much art for according to his notion gardening was little more than “sweeping Nature.”

In the midst of this literary discussion comes the work of another practical gardener, Stephen Switzer, a pupil of London and Wise. His “The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation” appeared in 1715 and was published again with additions as “Ichnographia Rustica” in 1718. Switzer’s work shows several indications of new ideals. He is the first of the writers on gardens to hold up Milton’s[542] description of a garden as a model to be followed. He also protested against the cutting-down of fine old trees at the command of so-called “Improvers of Estates.” He said he knew not “whether to think with Pity or Disdain” of a property owner who could thus sanction the wanton destruction of “noble Oaks and other umbrageous Trees.” He likewise urged the abandonment of box-work and “such like trifling ornaments,” and said that “the largest walk in the most magnificent garden one can think of” was to his taste inferior to “a level easy walk of gravel or sand shaded over with Trees and running thro’ a cornfield or Pasture ground.” More revolutionary still was his advice to abolish walls and to embellish the whole estate. London and Wise had insisted upon the boundary wall as necessary to give dignity to the gardens and to unite them architecturally with the house, but Switzer said he would “throw the Garden open to all View, to the unbounded Felicities of distant Prospect, and the expansive Volumes of Nature herself.” This substitution of the sunk fence for the boundary walls is generally counted as “the beginning of the end of Formal Gardening.” Horace Walpole credits Bridgeman with having first suggested this innovation, but the new scheme almost certainly originated with Switzer.

In gardening theoretical exposition and discussion would, from the nature of the case, antedate the actual construction of gardens according to new principles. Pope was one of the first, if not the first, to put the new ideas into practice. In 1718 he took a long lease of a house and five acres of land at Twickenham, and he at once set about the construction of a garden according to his own ideas. Said Horace Walpole, “It was a little bit of ground of five acres, enclosed with three lanes; and seeing nothing. Pope had twisted and twirled and rhymed and harmonized this, till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening beyond one another, and the whole surrounded by thick impenetrable woods.”[543] The plan of the garden drawn by John Searle after Pope’s death shows that in the five acres Pope had a shell temple, a large mount, two small mounts, a bowling green, a vineyard, a quincunx, an obelisk in memory of his mother, and hot-houses and gardeners’ sheds.[544] This garden could hardly be called “natural” but it was an undoubted protest against the formal school and was so regarded, and Pope was counted “the prophet of the new school.” Blomfield and Thomas[545] in reviewing the decay of formal gardening say, “It now became the fashion to rave about Nature, and to condemn the straightforward work of the formal school as so much brutal sacrilege. Pope and Addison led the way with about as much love of Nature as the elegant Abbé Delille some three generations later.” Mason calls Kent, the reputed father of landscape gardening, “Pope’s bold associate.”[546] Walpole dwells on the assistance Kent had from Pope and thinks that the ideas of some of Kent’s best works were really borrowed from Pope’s garden at Twickenham.[547] Hazlitt emphasizes the healthy and important influence in this direction exercised by Pope.[548] In “The Quarterly” for 1816, in a review of Humphrey Repton’s work, we find the influence of Pope commented on as follows: “He so completely developed the principles of true gardening that the theories of succeeding writers have been little more than amplifications of his short general precepts.”

Pope’s paper in “The Guardian” was in 1713, and his garden was practically completed by 1718[549] but his most influential utterance on the theory of gardening did not come till 1731, and before that time other significant writings had appeared.[550] One of these was “Huetiana,” a translation in 1722 of the work of Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), bishop of Avranches. In the chapter on “Natural Beauties preferable to Artistic ones” he comments thus on the bad taste of his age: